Planet maemo: category "feed:f37232ce73d3b53f5ae8169b333a7127"

Rodrigo and I were invited to talk about Ubuntu Mobile at the Bossa Conference this year in Manaus.The finished presentation is here but what follows is a short rundown of what the Lucid release means for Ubuntu. Some highlights are

Rootstock/Rootstock gui – integrated with oem-config

Qemu-arm-static

ARM/Thumb2 support - the archive in lucid is built for the ARMv7 architecture with thumb2 support.

EFL 2D Launcher

Rootstock is a graphical (and command line of course) set of tools to create a fully configured tarball or VM image of an ubuntu rootfs from scratch

so that you can extract it to a root device. One nice thing about this is that various tasks can be included in the image. This is very useful when working with ARM. Other tools such as Moblin Image Creator exist to do more or less the same thing but Rootstock is leading the way in innovation at the moment IMO. If you want to really customize an image then you need to use seeds and germinate a set of packages - for this you will need to read our book ;)

The binfmt-misc module in the Ubuntu kernel makes it possible to execute binaries of foreign arches under linux. This means it is possible to have an arm eabi enabled chroot on a i386 system :) - this is as simple as running

ARM/Thumb 2 is the instruction set underlying the ARM Cortex
architecture which provides enhanced levels of performance, energy
efficiency, and code density for a wide range of embedded applications.The whole Ubuntu archive is being ported to Thumb 2 and we still have some some build failures- if you can help with ftbfs (failed to build from source) please help out here.

This has already been covered extensively elsewhere but the new UI for ARM based Ubuntu devices will rock hard for Lucid. The tool will detect hardware and if a device does not have 3D capabilities it wall fall back to the EFL launcher It is hard to stress why this is rocks so much but a unified user experience across i386/Atom and ARM devices should ring a few bells in marketing departments everywhere, right.

Even after the long session at UDS it took us some more time and lots more caffeine to get Liquid finally down on the wiki. We thought we were the crazy mobile heads until Adenilson showed up at one meeting raving about plasma mobile!.

After this the major tasks came down to packaging plasma mobile and modifying kwin and kdm for a mobile device.These are the most important things we need to do before Feature Freeze in mid February. We also of course need to do the meta package, default-settings and work on the theme but we can do this right up to the Lucid release of Liquid

I have been travelling and otherwise occupied since UDS so have not had as much time as I would like to hack on this.

Luckily Rodrigo wanted to 'tocar a bola' for a while and he has been working with the rest of the Ubuntu Mobile team on some fancy liquid moves. This included setting up an icecc compile farm which meant that today we managed to finally get plasma-mobile compiled, packaged and put up on REVU for some feedback. The obligatory screenshot on Ubuntu Lucid is here

Any designers looking at this screenshot will I imagine have lots of ideas about how this 'user experience' could be improved. The nice thing about plasma is that according to Caio the whole interface can be changed very easily using just a qml template. If you feel excited by this then join the Liquid Hackers team on Launchpad or if you feel really inspired come to the Bossa in the Jungle in March where more mobile madness is sure to go down.

After getting the great news that Canonical would sponsor me for the Lucid Lynx developer summit in Dallas, I wanted to let people know about our book and the good reviews we are getting and find out what we could look forward to in the mobile world for this next LTS release.

Yet it is being built today. The
stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start. The European Commission published its action plan for IOT in June of this year. In hundreds of years our real needs have not changed. We want to be loved,
feel safe, have fun, be relevant in work and friendship, be able to
support our families and somehow play a role - however small - in the
larger scheme of things.

So what will really happen when things, homes and cities become smart? The
result will probably be an avalanche of what at first looks like very small
steps, small changes.

Currently IOT applications, demos and infrastructure are rolled out from
negative arguments only. For logistics, it is anti-theft. For ehealth it
is the lack of human personnel that requires the building of smart houses.
From a policy view it is the ensuring of safety, control and surveillance
of both items and in public spaces. For retail it is shelf space management.

Council thinktank aims to grow into a positively critical counterpart to
these negativities in focusing on the quality of interaction and
potentialities of IOT for social, communicative and economic (personal
fabrication, participatory finance, alternative currencies)
connectivity between humans, humans and things and humans and their surroundings.

The wrestling with ambient technologies - the noise - is rapidly going out
of corporate memory. A new young generation growing up at ease with 'total' connectivity, will enter IOT territory as simply another layer, another iteration of something they are comfortable with.

Therefore the launch of Council will highlight a personal history of
locative media & hybrid spaces, by professionals of the i3 (Intelligent
Information Interfaces) days, as well as the latest tools and applications, workshops on key issues, short keynotes and time for debate and discussion.

Coming hard on the heels of the news that our mug shots have thankfully been removed from the front cover of the 'Professional Ubuntu Mobile Development' book to be replaced with a Formula 1 racing car (WTF!) comes the news that the Ubuntu MID distribution will have a community release codenamed Ubuntu Liquid Remix during the Lucid Lynx cycle.

We are still fleshing out the goals and the work plan for the Liquid Remix and I expect that this will gain more traction at the Ubuntu Developer Summit this November. We have had a discussion with the Mer guys about maybe using the Open Build System for packaging although we will continue to use the Ubuntu infrastructure and seeds to actually germinate our image.

It seems that there is a great opportunity for collaboration and synergy between Mer and Liquid Remix so I am looking forward to the next 6 months of working together.

I was elected today by the foundation to become a member of the Open Web Foundation.

What is Open Data and the Open Web?

Open Data is increasingly important as services move on-line, indeed data is becoming as important as the actual source code itself.The Open Web then is all about the data and protocols behind web services - an Open Web needs Open Data and Open Data needs Open Specifications.

The Web as the Platform

Some initiatives such as Microformats, OpenID and OAuth have come about recently and gained popularity.Although they come from different backgrounds they share some of the same goals and have gained widespread adoption on the web. They are also characterized by an agile (for want of a better analogy) development process -OAuth for instance was a matter of weeks between the drafts and the actual specification shipping. As well as sharing goals they also share some of the problems too - there is no clear licensing for specifications, no standard way to deal with Intellectual Property Rights and no overarching community that transcends the projects with a social contract for all to adhere too.

What is the Open Web Foundation?

It is a non-profit foundation, largely modeled after a hybrid of the Apache Software Foundation and things like the OpenID foundation which will create new open specifications for the web. It will also importantly think about how to create community responsibility and recognition for defending the "Open Web". It already has considerable industry and community support and I am incredibly proud to become a member. I am looking forward to working with everyone on our important tasks!.
More about the foundation is here

The Open Web Foundation was conceived last year to create a framework
which helps communities behind open web specifications navigate the
non-technical organizational and legal challenges that successful
specifications are bound to encounter. Many community-driven standards
efforts falter when it comes to the heavy investment of time figuring
out how to work within our existing intellectual property laws and are
often forced to create their own non-profit organization just to
support a ten page specification.

Together with 42 other organizations in Amazonas the Nokia Technology Institute (INdT) took part in the 2008 Global Week of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

This is an initiative led by the Institute of Entrepreneurial Endeavor with the objective being to stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit which exists within everyone.

For INdT the event happened at an ideal moment as the Institute is currently implementing an innovation management system as one of its key 'pillars' of corporate entrepreneurship.

'This event was yet another way to spread our culture of innovation'

said Ana Sena who is responsible for Innovation Management at the Institute.

During the event there was a week long Workshop in Python Programming (Python is a programming language for mobile phones), as well as a day of talks run by members of the Institute which covered such topics as Good Techniques for Project Management, Your Role in Business Management, Agile Methods for Design and Interface Projects and Innovation and Mobility

3. Replace the images in the sheet. Note that some images are going to be resized inside Canola (like the scrollbar) and the graphic needs to be designed with that in mind. Consult the "Stretch axis" column of each image for details. Also, when replacing the images in the sheet make sure to respect the sliced areas (View > Show > Slices).

4. Save your images(File > Save For Web & Devices) using the PNG-24 preset. A dialog is going to appear asking where you wanna save the files. Select a folder and hit the save button.

5. Open the selected folder on finder/explorer/terminal/etc, you are going to see a subfolder called "images", open it. If you properly follow all the step until now, your theme's images are going to be here.

6. Compact all the archives inside this folder(zip or tar.gz). Here lies the trick, compact only the images, not the whole folder. In other words, if your open you zip package IT MUST ONLY CONTAIN IMAGE FILES.

This service allows *anyone* to create (and publish if they would like to) a theme for Canola. All you need to do is read the guide (PDF), create your images,zip them up and upload them to the site. The service then handles the creation of the Debian package and offers a choice of Creative Commons licenses should you want your new theme to be submitted for inclusion on the gallery. The resulting .deb can be downloaded and installed on any Maemo powered device

The site was conceived by handful, the UI was designed by giselle, the CSS written by hugo and I did the Django and the Python work (based on a prototype made by Eduardo Fleury). It was really great working as a team and web work really lends itself to working in a distributed manner (in this case between Manaus and Recife)